Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The fairest of them all?

Episode Date: December 28, 2016

Our Surveillance miniseries continues with a special holiday episode. Your host visits both the glass room ( a fake pop up store) and the Google pop up store (a real pop up store).  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Fairest of Them All. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a sign. Actually, it was an ad for something called The Glass Room. Curious, I investigated. And a few days later, I found myself at the opening party for this... Well, the whole thing took place at a pop-up store in Soho. And while it looked like a store,

the glass room was filled with stuff you'd find in an Apple store, tablets, phones, displays. Nothing was for sale. The glass room wasn't a store. It was an art project. An art project about surveillance, technology, our data, all the things I'm exploring in this TOE miniseries. They even had these workers dressed in white uniforms

who would guide you around the space. They were called Ingeniuses. But my favorite thing about the glass room was that some of the objects and exhibits were real and some were made up. And it wasn't that easy to tell the difference. So I wouldn't say we have fake products as such. We have artistic ideas, sort of experiments. And that is not unreal. It's just sort of like one-off quirky, funny interventions. This is Henrik Chulu. He's a member of Tactical Tech,

a Berlin-based collective of technologists and artists responsible for the Glass Room. Henrik took issue with me calling some of the pieces in the exhibit fake because most of them have not only proved themselves as concepts, some of them, like smell dating from the artists Tiga Brain and Sam Levine, have even been tested in the conceptual marketplace. So the idea is that you wear a t-shirt for three days and you wear it without any deodorant or any perfume and then you send it back to the service and then they send you samples of other people who have done the same thing and then you can rate the

smell of whatever samples you've got sent and you can rate them like highly or badly and then if you've rated someone highly and they've also done the same to you you can go on a date so it's sort of like just getting at that like of privacy and intimacy and so on. But like I said, most of the real services on display in the classroom were just as unreal as smell dating. Like this company that trains algorithms to reconstruct faces from DNA. By using a lot of sort of training data where you had the face and you had the DNA, they trained an algorithm to be able to sort of guesstimate what a face would look like.

The skin color, hair color, eye color, freckles, and also the geographic ancestry, which will be a proxy, of course, for race in the U.S., to generate sometimes eerily accurate faces of the person whose DNA would be found, for example, at a crime scene or whatever. All the real surveillance-based products on display in the Glass Room were positioned as they are in the real world, not as things that spy on us, but rather as things that help us. Like the

humanized social metric badge. It's the employee badge of the future. And it's not just meant for checking in and out of the workplace. It's also registering your social interactions. Who speaks, who interrupts, who speaks

the most, who's sort of in what conversations and what places in the building. And then that data gets correlated with email data, who's copied in on different email threads and calendar data, who's attending what meetings and so on. And then you get what they call people analytics, which is basically as sort of social graph of the company that you can sort of manage in order to create new teams that are more productive, more innovative and so on.

But the sort of flip side of that is of course that you are measured like your social life, like how introverted you are, how extroverted you are, becomes like part of the digital machinery that drives a company. It is not that difficult to imagine

the dark side for any of these real products. I mean, come on. I can already hear the voice of my future manager coming through my humanized social metric badge, screaming at me to get back to work, loading up the drones on the warehouse floor as I'm trying to slit my wrists in the bathroom. So I steered Henrik back over to the part of the room dedicated to artistic interventions. We stopped in front of a glass bubble containing a house or houses belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, the man who says privacy is no longer a social norm.

Yeah, he said that. And recently after that, he bought a house in Palo Alto. And then he bought all the four houses around the house because he didn't really want neighbors who could snoop on him. And then he made all the construction workers and interior designers that were working on the house sign non-disclosure agreements in order to even be able to do the work. We basically recreated the Mark Zuckerberg house from pictures and information from Google Earth and so on. And we have this model house in a glass bubble and it's surrounded by images of the houses around it. The Facebook bubble is a data visualization Tactical Tech produced with the help of the designer Lelomo. They also collaborated on a series of blocks representing the amount of money that Apple keeps in offshore accounts to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

It towers over the other blocks. You can sort of compare the amount of taxes that haven't been paid with different posts on the U.S. government discretionary budget. And they made a small-scale model of the New York offices of a data analytics company called Palantir. And it's basically a picture of a bed with a unicorn, stuffed unicorn on top of it, then basically a beer pong table,

and then on the wall there is depicted the map from the game Risk, which is basically a game of world domination. That's the sort of goal of the game is to rule the world. Perhaps the folks at Palantir are into world domination. But considering their founder, Peter Thiel, is now advising the Trump administration on data and surveillance and technology, it would be nice to know a bit more. But we don't. In fact, the only reason we know about these stuffed unicorn and the game of risk is a

photo that accompanied a puff piece in the New York Times. So I think the main idea of this is basically that we don't really know that much about Palantir. They are sort of off the radar for people who are just, you know, using the internet in their daily lives. So another thing that I'd like to show you here is the, it's called the Alphabet Empire. And it's basically showing all the different companies that Google has either invested in or acquired since 1998. Yeah. I knew it would be difficult to record at a pop-up store

in Soho at Christmas time. And I was prepared to deal with the traffic and the people. But I drew the line at the dude drilling a hole into the wall of the building next door. So I suggested Henrik and I take a walk down the street to visit another glass room, the Google pop-up store.

Here, the colors were brighter, the displays were slicker, and the music was pumping. Google clearly spent a lot more money than the Mozilla Foundation, who bankrolled the Berlin technologists and artists. And the Google geniuses were clearly trained to get people like us to buy stuff.

As far as the Pixel phones go, there's the Pixel and the Pixel XL, which is a 5-inch screen and 5.5-inch screen, respectively. So I have this actually at Google Phone. Okay. So this is the old Nexus 5. What's the difference between them?

As you can hear, Henrik is kind of unironically curious about the new Google Phone, which kind of freaked me out. Because how the hell are we going to win if the companies who are determined to gather up and sell all of our data can reel in all the smart critics and artists and podcasters using nothing more than a shiny gadget? A premium smartphone, a little bit higher in the price point. Pixel starts at $649. Pixel XL starts at $769.

Of course, the shiny new gadget is more expensive than the shiny old gadget. But the Google genius assured us that the camera alone was worth the price, and we were ushered into a dark room to prove it. So I don't know if DeeDee already told you, but we created this to showcase how amazing the Google Pixel camera is, which is currently the best on the market for any phone, in low-light settings, but really in all settings. What you see is exactly what you get,

which is a nice, unique experience. Henrik and I both took out our phones and snapped images of the delicately crimped LED strips hanging from the ceiling. The lights created a sort of 3D version of the Google logo. My Samsung did okay, but Henrik's old Nexus phone took a photo that was pretty much indistinguishable from the one the Google genius took on her Pixel. It's a really nice camera. By all means, you both have great cameras, but this one just. It just picks up the color, the vibrance, the clarity. His is pretty close.

His is pretty close, though, yeah. Not that different. But your phone costs like half the price. Yeah, it costs nothing near the pixel. But you can't buy it anymore, unfortunately. Except used. And there are financing options. That's great.

Do you guys want to jump in there and I can take photos? And you can see how it does. No, I'm cool. Thank you. Okay, Google, turn on all the lamps. Okay, turning the lamp on. We also got a demo of the new Google Home device. Just like the surveillance objects in the glass room,

Google Home is positioned not as a device that will spy on you, but rather one that will help you turn on the lights, play your music, boil water, and buy things. Well, the listening device from that other internet company might be better equipped to do that. Okay, Google, are you smarter than Alexa? Sorry, I'm not sure how to help with that. Unbiased.

Visiting the Google room after the glass room was both extremely illuminating and disorienting. Do we really need black mirrors in order to see the dark side of filling our homes with devices that listen to our every word and track our every gesture? Do we really need black mirrors to see that our data is being used to build powerful surveillance and advertising-based systems of control? And if we do, how do we compete? That's the question I struggle with.

But isn't it strange that we live in a time where to some of us that is incredibly creepy and to another, in that context, in the Google Store context, it's like the shiny future that we all need to be excited about. I asked one of the artists from The Glass Room, Tiga Brain, this question. Henrik talked about her smell data piece earlier. It's the dating service that used T-shirts people sent in after wearing them. We definitely are exploring that kind of territory here.

On our website, you know, we say that in our FAQs, there's a question of, like, is my data safe? And our answer is we're not sure. You know, which is very honest, because who knows what happens in the future as different companies that have these databases change and get bought out by each other and so forth. I wanted to talk to Tiga Brain because Henrik told me she was one of the smartest and most

optimistic artists involved in the Glassroom project. And it turns out she is hopeful. She believes artistic interventions like smell dating and the Glassroom are capable of getting people to rethink their positions on data, surveillance and technology and perhaps imagine better ones. We're so familiar and used to encountering emerging technologies in that commercial space, right?

Here's the shiny new thing, it's amazing, it's got all these new features, it's going to solve all your problems. Like that's the underlying story. So I think having these art pieces and this sort of commentary around those technologies conveyed in the same language is really powerful because you walk in and you're like, oh, I know what to do here. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Fairest of Them All. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Henrik Choulou and Tiga Brain.

The Glass Room got so much great press. I'll post a few articles on the TOE page, but really, they aren't hard to find. I definitely encourage you to waste a little time on the internet and learn more. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's greatest podcasts. These are the shows that are going to some of the world's greatest podcasts.

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